Tideland

I wanted to like this film. I want to like every Terry Gilliam film so that I can keep referring to him as the most consistently excellent director working today whether it happens to be the case or not. And it does have the beautiful but brutal fantasy feel common to much of his work

But it's a hard film to like. It's a hard film to watch. It doesn't have a plot so much as it's simply spending time with a girl coping with the massively dire circumstances that surround her in the only way that she can: by going batshit crazy.

I'd like to call it daringly unconventional, but frankly I'm just going to go ahead and call it boring. As strong as the little girls performance is (and it is incredibly strong) there's little else to hook you in and drive the film forward. It's just stuff happening, and not very comfortable stuff. It's unrelentingly grim, both her parents die within fifteen minutes and her father sits in the front room and rots. I found little respite in her willful ignorance.

I think if it had been a short film I would be raving about it's wonders instead of focusing largely on the negative. It is beautiful in it's warped way and her fantasy is marvelously understated for Gilliam, but without those threads to follow it's less of a film and more a straight work of art. Magical, distressing, sadly unengaging.